As I posted last week, I’ve hit an emotional rough patch. A real feeling of burn-out. The cure, according to the proponents of Positive Psychology…and doesn’t the name of that discipline just inspire trust? Anyhow, the cure for depression is to block out significant activities where you can focus on the area of your greatest strength.
Me, a lot of my effort involves organizing data. I’m extremely good at it. But it just so happens that “being organized” comes at a great emotional cost to me. I’m plain living hellfire at coming up with new ideas, novel solutions, discovering patterns, opening cans of worms – that’s what I really do best.
Last weekend presented an opportunity to do something creative. I decided to do something novel, fun, energizing. Anything. And guess what? It just seemed like too much effort. Even turning on the tube and watching the SyFy (another winning name) network seemed like too much trouble.
I decided to do nothing. But I’m not terribly good at simply doing nothing, so I had to do nothing with a vengeance. I gathered all my ambient and vintage electronica mp3 tracks onto my iPhone, anything with Fripp or Eno or any avante garde composer with a German name and put the whole thing on Shuffle. I also found my old Lava Lamp, drew the blinds and plugged my ears into 12 hours of sonic assault.
The results were fascinating. After a couple of hours alternating between “Somber Reptiles” and “Always Crashing in the Same Car” with a long stretch from “Index of Metals,” I swear that I could literally feel my brain reorganizing itself. And this kind of makes sense when you think about it. Loud, highly textured music, for me at least, leads instantly to creative visualizing…high intensity daydreaming if you will. Apparently there is a link between executive function tasks and daydreaming. Just a wild guess…not being a real or even pretend doctor…perhaps daydreaming re-sets the neurons that are responsible for executive tasks (ie putting on your socks first and then your shoes, despite the fact that you just told everyone that you’re putting on your shoes and socks.)
Of course this could be a bunch of nonsense. Maybe I indulged myself in 12 hours of iTunes-enhanced placebo. But hey, who cares if it’s a placebo? Just as long as it works…